Wishing Tree

Kasturi Kiritharan grew up in bustling London, where the only access to nature came in the form of manicured local parks and greenways. “When I started up a serious, self-led art practice, it came to me as a surprise that I kept reaching for ideas and images rooted in the natural world,” she says. Fresh off a year of study at Leith School of Art in Edinburgh and recently returned to London, the artist celebrates outdoor life as a way of feeling grounded and present in any place, despite how uprooted she may feel.

Through an involved layering process, Kiritharan adds paint, then sands the surfaces so that the distinctions between animals, foliage, or landscapes blur together. She then stains areas so colors overlap and scratches into the surface to create textures that either highlight or bury details. Cows rest in a pasture, a moth alights, or trees fade into a misty vista, creating a sense that our relationship to what we think of as wilderness—and distance—is intimate, interconnected, and enigmatic. “This way of working is, to me, a way of emulating—in paint—what it might feel like to retrieve a memory,” she says, “where certain elements become distorted and the image in your mind’s eye metamorphoses into something else altogether.”

Kiritharan views her practice as a means to tracing her footsteps in the world, capturing the subtleties of a campsite in Kinross, Scotland, or a walk along rocky beaches on Jeju Island, South Korea. In a square format reminiscent of the ubiquitous Instagram post, the artist intentionally reveals the handmade, analog characteristics of each rendering to place them in direct contrast with the kind of digital snapshot cataloguing we often do with our phones while we travel, which detach us from the present. Kiritharan slows down the process of seeing and remembering, encountering places with what she calls a “sense of reverence… meditating on the spirit of Earth itself.”

Find more on the artist’s Instagram.

All images © Kasturi Kiritharan